Doors open at 11AM with an opening address by S A Guide-Dogs Association at 11:30. Throughout the day there will be opportunities to interact with Guide Dog Owners and their dogs, as well as Puppy Raisers with their puppies in training.

South African Guide-Dogs Association provides Independence, Mobility and Companionship to the differently abled community of South Africa by providing Guide, Service and Autism Support Dogs. Ten percent of all art sales will be put towards the sponsorship and training of guide dog puppies.

The landscape around me is presence in excess. Everything is balanced and delicate.
My reflection is less important when fish swim beneath the ripples.

We think that equilibrium happens at ease, independent of us. But effort exists there. Fragility and symbiosis. A part of ourselves that we are neglecting.

Do we serve the earth as it serves us?

– Jordan Sweke October 2015 –

My Reflection is Less Important when Fish Swim Beneath the Ripples. [1]

Written by Natasha Norman

Good artists are curious. This has been a stalwart of both my own teaching practice and that of my teachers. Why? Because curiosity involves an exploration, a humble finding and thinking. In many ways this is the ‘antidote’ that Sweke seeks: the curiosity of looking through the binary lens into the world between.

I use the time watering my garden with my bathwater as a meditation. I am always amazed how far the bathwater stretches. If it has been a decadent soak I can water just over half the flowerbeds: irises, hydrangea, plectranthus, aloe, nasturtiums, vying for sunlight beneath the bougainvillea and banana leaves.

The natural environment has returned to our concerns, not as prime time sensationalism but a deeper more civic responsibility. Research is being conducted not only into the science of environmental change and what daily steps can be taken to combat that, but also why science, a purported ‘objective’ study, cannot be consumed with the same objectivity by leading politicians and international corporations.

There is overwhelming evidence that we are “biased information processors” who engage in “motivated reasoning” to try to bend facts about the world to comport with what we want to believe. (Mooney 2016 [2])

Curiosity, particularly “science curiosity” according to the researcher above, is identified as the space where a less polarized and more complex understanding of the world can develop.

The mournful croons of 1991 pop hit Acid Rain by South African Wendy Oldfield have matured into hard hitting debates around conservation, with fines imposed for negligent mining practices and a movement to cut down alien trees (there is a heated debate about the removal of pines from Tokai’s forestry to make way for indigenous fynbos). In many practical ways our society is grappling with antidotal means of addressing our relationship with natural environments. What remains key in these activities is the fact that society and environment are linked by relationship.

The human condition is defined by a connection to environment. Kastner [3] notes in his preface to a Phaidon volume Land and Environmental Art (1998) that the environment remains “the biggest of the big pictures” against which human activity plays itself out. Beyond the “bloom and rot” of our lives we also aspire to mark, inscribe and gesture in and on the landscape. We hold a curious drive to translate and transgress space. Culture’s continued fascination with land is a testament to the way it functions both as mirror and lens to the human condition.

Sweke’s embodied approach to art and the environment owes much to this historic cultural legacy of the artist faced with the natural world. The Romantics foregrounded their subject of the sublime in nature, 1960s Land Art pushed the gallery boundaries even further – toppling the modernist end-game. There were also individual artists making quieter body-land reflections such as Ana Mendieta, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Strydom van der Merwe. Sweke’s work foregrounds a personal experience of natural spaces in both his photography and paintings that begin with a walk or a hike away from the urban centre. He brings this experience back into his paintings in the energy and immediacy of mark making on a flat painted surface. Embracing the caustic flatness of a canvas surface, he reanimates the lived experience through a limited palette of expressionist marks that, in their simplicity, evoke a sense of space beyond the painted surface.

Grappling with this exaggerated sense of flatness in his painting is the site where Sweke begins to unravel the boundary between binaries. Balance/imbalance, abstraction/representation, positive/negative, void/object, depth/flatness: the viewer is left in the unsettling space between. And this space between sight and painted object is relentless. Sweke has given himself strict colour parameters (French Ultramarine, Burnt Umber and Titanium White) in which to articulate this tension. En mass his installation forces a more subtle engagement with form and illusion.

The individual’s tendency for “motivated reasoning” is in part a survival instinct based on our senses that have become dangerously warped in an information age. The emotional trigger that tailors our response to information is based fundamentally on personal and deeply held beliefs. Contradicting such deeply held ideologies can cause an individual to hold onto the original belief more tightly [4]. Positioning a viewer in a more ambiguous space where curiosity is activated to find knowledge is an infinitely more progressive space of engagement. Beyond the snappy judgements, one-liner tweets and consumptive images of contemporary media, Sweke’s exhibition emerges as an understated exploration of seeing and feeling. Taking those primal states based upon real experiences in natural environments as his starting point, he translates them into an artistic space built upon the illusionistic plane of the two-dimensional painted canvas. Pablo Picasso’s famous dictum on art and lies applies here:

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” [5]

Sweke’s gallerist tells the story of friends that hiked in Machu Picchu, Peru. Overcome by the sight of the landscape at the summit of their peak they promptly burst into tears. Their fellow travellers sought comfort in the mediation of the sight through their camera phones. The natural sublime remains an experience beyond language. Despite its mediation by technology we are continuously left overwhelmed by the intimate complexity of such a relationship and its profound affect on our condition as human beings.

The Antidote is at its heart a restrained response to an overwhelming emotion felt by the artist in the natural sublime. Sweke’s translation of this experience attempts to situate his viewer in a similar experience of the sublime – what the Romantics have described as awe, terror or danger. Current conceptions of environmental relationships may be turning to the civic, which, while progressive, are also in danger of putting that relationship back into a stable and comprehendible space. Sweke attempts to disrupt any containable readings of The Antidote to place the viewer in a space of curious engagement, to evoke something of that indescribable feeling of the immensity of the natural in relation to ourselves and to gateway an articulation of binary thinking into the world between expression and experience.
Footnotes:

[1] Title taken from a line in 2014 short story by Jordan Sweke titled Does our ruin benefit the earth?

[2] Chris Mooney. 2016. ‘Researchers may have finally found an antidote to biased thinking about science’ in The Washington Post [online] 3 August, 2016.

To inhabit a space implies a type of ownership by presence. City bylaws and property deeds describe space in one way but that map frays at its intersection with the human occupation of place. Daily movements define and embrace space, carving it with the simultaneous care and ruthlessness of a sculptor.

The modernist trend is to present information in an ordered, chronological way – where meaning is imparted, not found. The shift to an artistic and narrative practice around providing immersive situations where viewers discover meaning for themselves has emerged as a counterpoint to that reportage trend. In Senyol’s work, this idea of immersive, experiential space provides a process of critical interrogation with the notion of inhabitation that is neither city bylaw nor street dweller, but somewhere between the two – a place where art is the patina of a lived experience.

The patina of Senyol’s experience of space is one characterised by transition. His home and studio in Woodstock is on the fringe of an urban renewal zone, a site characterized by places of collapse and repair. It is a space of binaries, of wealth and poverty, newness and decay, concrete and park verge. Senyol recognises that between these binaries resides a new creation altogether. This ‘fringe’ between states is his artistic Eden.

Works for inhabitant are more loosely based on Senyol’s daily sketches than in previous exhibitions. He has foregrounded his role as translator in this series, working across multiple canvases simultaneously in a process of experiential storytelling. He has also expanded beyond the canvas into the gallery space itself, evolving that experiential story telling onto textured gallery walls and the inclusion of small sculptures or urban cairns – a personal memorialising of the oft overlooked beauty of urban debris.

Senyol received no formal artistic training, but he has been studying art and the mark since his fascination with skateboarding magazines as a teenager in Cape Town. He is inspired by the Mission School Art Movement in San Francisco, the Woostercollective, Marc Gonzalez, Ed Templeton, Barry McGee, punk rock music, the way skateboarding & cycling enables him to access the city and books in the City Library. Graphics, album covers, magazine layouts and illustrations are an important influence to his aesthetic as is the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Henri Matisse and Joan Miró, respectively. His works celebrate the abstract moments of the image: formal qualities of line, form and hue from the basis of his compositions that evolve through the process of painting. Senyol began exhibiting “free art” on street corners in the early 2000s and this enabled him to connect directly with the street and its unexpected audiences. He may now exhibit almost exclusively within the gallery space, but this shift remains, for him, just another space to engage the viewer in a new way.

Leap years squeeze an extra day into every fourth year and in the same way this exhibition is a way of squeezing an extra body of work into 2016. We do things a bit differently during leap years and the many traditions and festivities surrounding the extra day are indicative of that. Many leap year legends are centered on women being ‘allowed’ to do things they usually weren’t supposed to; like proposing marriage and asking men to dance at parties. So because 2016 is a leap year, in the spirit of doing things differently this show is going to take place exclusively online. I wanted to make my paintings accessible to viewers who don’t necessarily live in Cape Town and can’t physically be at the opening.

As usual the themes in my work are as varied as the weather and my mood, ranging from skinny-dipping to sunsets and shindigs.

Come have a digital dance with me.

– Kirsten Sims. October 2016. Cape Town. South Africa –

Due to a growing International collectorship and demand for Kirsten Sims’ artworks – reaching from Cape Town South Africa as far and wide as Australia, Canada, Mexico, The United States, Germany, Hong Kong, England, Russia, Holland and France – it is was with great pleasure that we presented an exhibition of Artworks that was sold exclusively online and accessible to both South African and International audiences.

On behalf of Salon Ninety One and Kirsten Sims, we would like to thank you for your support and enthusiasm, which has not only inspired this wonderful collection, but has challenged us to operate in new and exciting ways.

“Painterly marks not only make up subjects but are subjects in themselves.” Heidi Fourie is constantly rethinking the notion of ‘the painting.’ She is very much inspired by the nature of the medium, embracing painting’s inherent language of mark-making to explore the balance of order and chaos, control and uncontrollability, figuration and its negation in the picture plane.

Fourie completed her BA Fine Arts (cum laude) in 2012 at the University of Pretoria. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Antwerp. She has also been a finalist in Sasol New Signatures (2011, 2013), ABSA l’Atelier (2013, 2014), Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards (2012, 2013) and Sanlam Portrait Awards (2013, 2015). Her subject matter is selected from daily encounters with environments or existing media such as film and virtual spaces. She has recently started exploring the Internet as an alternative and somewhat distorted means of travel and exploration, while some paintings are based on physical travels and scenes from the garden of her childhood home. “All of the places depicted, whether found virtually or on physical visits, are borrowed from its owners and transformed into new fictional spaces”. The scenes display various degrees of human interference.

ARTIST STATEMENT
From the garden in which I spent my childhood, to other people’s gardens and land, to steal-shots from virtually recorded public spaces, I searched relentlessly for scenes to translate into interesting and perhaps puzzling or unsettling paintings. Visiting all these spaces I felt myself a spectator, finding everything in a predetermined state co-designed by nature and its respective owners. Most of the scenes display some degree of human intervention and were perhaps even abandoned halfway through construction or underwent some decay. When I begin to paint I start to become an active participant in the landscape design, and the scene becomes detached from its geographical origins and become a fiction.

When choosing subjects I look for forms which lend themselves to specific approaches to mark making and keep the act of painting and the nature of oil paint in mind. I felt like a child at play in a vast and infinite garden, with something interesting and daunting behind every corner driven by curiosity and wonder. My father’s garden thus seemed an appropriate setting or playground, as although the lay of the land and geographical features have stayed the same throughout my experiences of it, Vegetation has constantly been redesigned and went through cycles of being improved upon and seasonal neglect. Exploring this garden after a year of living elsewhere, it seemed an unfamiliar place with an uncanny familiarity especially under the veil of darkness.

Relatively new, virtual means of travel present the convenience of teleportation to accommodate my impatience and tendency to boredom so I never need to stick around in a place longer than I feel. I played around with the inevitable glitches that occur and “paint” with the data at hand by creating the illusion of movement through manipulating the view strategically. The process of painting adds another layer of anomaly to the image where the stubbornness and will of the oils and pigments interferes with my intention of representation. I constantly alternate my focus from the parts and the whole, the gestalt and the individual marks, to assure the integrity of both. If I accidentally create an interesting and visually pleasing mark it has to be left untampered with even if it does not resemble the corresponding area in the reference as it will be an injustice to the painting to favour the existing reality above the fiction.

I want there to be some ambiguity on the origin of the respective paintings and create a mystery around which are from my childhood backyard, which from physical hikes or virtual “hikes”.

The title is inspired by the East Asian principle of “incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden”. Borrowed Scenery is largely a continuation of my first solo exhibition, Islands (2015), where I spent countless hours travelling the virtually recorded world through Google street view from the singular vantage point of my studio. I imagined myself on an island, catching mere glimpses of other islands. Rather than following a continuous trajectory, I jumped from one place to the next and was specifically interested in the moments of transition where everything deforms and abstracts. For this body of work I added more personal footage and included familiar figures and imagery obtained from my own physical travels. I thus took features from outside and inside my physical reach to create my painterly mark-laden garden.

Artwork titles are borrowed from the book, An essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and the beautiful, and, on the use of studying pictures, for the purpose of improving real landscape by British author, Uvedale Price, written in 1794. Price pleads for a greater respect to retaining the character, textures and idiosyncrasies of the environment in a garden’s “improvement” and avoiding over embellishment, excessive symmetry and over regulation. He asserts that nature and accidental formation possess greater ability than humans to create a pleasing and interesting composition.
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ARTWORKS:

INSTALLATION VIEWS:

Painting the Evocative Space

Written by Natasha Norman

He walked to the window and looked out on to the cool night sky.

Hontar gave a cough. ‘You had no choice. You must work in the real world. And the real world is thus.’‘Oh no,’ said Altamirano. ‘Thus have we made it.’ [1]

JM Coetzee in his White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) comments on the way that William Burchell (a man of science and an amateur painter) first observed the South African landscape through the lens of the Italian landscape tradition of the picturesque. Burchell’s exploration of the Cape colony and interior in 1822 lead him to exclaim the existence of a “species of beauty” with which European painters “may not yet be sufficiently acquainted” [2]. It seems a charming notion to us now that early explorers were so intent on aestheticizing their experience of a new landscape through the conventions of a painting tradition from an altogether different geographic climate. And yet the tomes on notions of landscape – its design in ideals of gardening or systems of portrayal in histories of art – lie dusty beneath our current conceptions of landscape as a contemporary image.

In a similar way to Burchell’s encounter with the foreign South African landscape, we encounter the imaging of land through the mediums of mapping, film and photography already packaged and framed within the aesthetic conventions of their technology. Such framings emerge as a strong aestheticizing force in our conceptions of real experiences of space.

Heidi Fourie’s Borrowed Scenery is an exploration in paint of this interplay between a longstanding tradition of landscape painting and the impact of contemporary forms of imaging the landscape upon a human experience of it. Contemporary notions of the real are heavily mediated by a history of the visual as well as new technologies of vision. The quote from Bolt’s 1988 book and film The Mission alerts us to this phenomenon: what is real is removed from us through the words and images which we create of it, and yet it is through our descriptions, imaging and ideas about the real, that we in fact ‘make it thus’.

Fourie’s landscapes attempt to be anonymous spaces, removed from the specificity of place in order to evoke an expository conception of the way one approaches space. While her theme is sited in the tradition of landscape painting (oil on canvas and paper) she consistently takes obtuse directions in her works to challenge remnants of the Burchell-type gazing of our own time.

Inspired by her research of the Chinese tradition of landscape painting, which under the Yuan Dynasty began to depart from the pure function of representation to the description of the “inner landscape of the artist’s heart and mind,” [3] Fourie often choses scenes that appear to be a glance away from the composed vista. Her source material is sifted from a combination of regular hiking, a game of GeoGuessr on Streetview or memories of her Dad’s backyard. The digital distortions of an image sourced online or the scopic glitch of a fish-eye camera lens draw attention to the mediated quality of her view while providing an important moment for a more personal interest in the challenge of mark making. She conceives the painted space as a carrier for marks. Her choice of a source image is for the marks it can trigger in a final painting. Thus it is in the wiping away of a painted layer, the thinly applied wash or the bold impasto smear that the artist’s more personal landscape emerges: the space of paint.

A single figure leads us through Fourie’s painted spaces, evoking the fragility of moments – not a constructed allegorical stability. Like the (often) tiny figure, as viewer we are engulfed by the immersive, experiential quality of the works and awed by the deft use of marks to define form. Thus by the painter’s authoritative hand we consider the subjectivity of the mediated gaze.

Fourie’s borrowed sceneries in paint disrupt the complacency of how our conceptions of space shape our experience of place. Like Hontar and Altamirano, the viewer is left to consider the mediated nature of experience and how a painted reality can evoke something very real indeed.
References:

A solo exhibition by Carla Kreuser at Field Office (in association with Salon Ninety One)

A collection of monotypes, drawings and watercolours that nod to Nick Drake’s paired-down folk album, ‘Pink Moon’, and to the first full moonafter the pink moss flowers start to bloom. To the colourful Victorian houses and to the characters that dot the streets of Woodstock. To the Zonne-, the Lelie- and the Roodebloem. To the wildflowers sneaking through cracks in old Papendorp’s sidewalks. To the human and the human-made. After a long winter, we are all waiting for spring to arrive. Pink moon is on its way.

ABOUT THE ARTIST | Carla Kreuser is an illustrator and graphic designer, with a penchant for horror movies and hand-binding her own illustrated books. Raised in Pretoria, she currently lives closer to the sea in Cape Town, where she works as a Creative Director at The Jupiter Drawing Room. In her spare time, she fills her sketchbooks by exploring the city on foot and people-watching.

Salon Ninety One will be participating in the FNB Joburg Art Fair from the 9th until the 11th of September 2016. This year the gallery will be presenting a curated solo exhibition of works by Andrzej Urbanski.

Visitors to the Salon Ninety One Booth can expect to see Urbanski’s signature large-scale abstract Canvases, composed of shimmering optically bending spaces in jewel-like hues, complimented by the minimalism, strong lines and illusory play between the planes and shadows of the Artist’s metal Sculptures.

Since its inception, Salon91 has remained dedicated to serving as a platform for the development of young / upcoming South African artists, and more recently a small percentage of international artists. A number of young artists exhibiting with the gallery have proven to excel in their respective fields, showing considerable growth and appreciation over the years. The impressive positive trajectory of Andrzej Urbanski’s career over the last three years of exhibiting with Salon91 bears testament to the gallery’s mission, rendering a solo showing by the artist a highly appropriate representation of the gallery and its work at this important African Art Fair.

Andrzej Urbanski

Andrzej Urbanski – FNB Joburg Art Fair Collection

Text by Natasha Norman

Andrzej Urbanski creates large, shimmering, optically bending spaces inspired by the textures, colours and sensations of 21st century living. His paintings and sculptures are a translation of the digital image into the art object. Forms are inspired by the architectural squares, triangles and hexagons of today’s contemporary built environment. His abstraction of these elements on the canvas refers to the shape and colour of media, fashion and cellphone app technology. His is a digital formalism in direct response to the often fleeting, colourful, digital imaging on screen and street.

The street runs deeply in his blood. The many years as an undergraduate Communication and Design student in the very newly de-walled Berlin was a time of full-time devotion to graffiti. After Urbanski had converted his undergraduate diploma into a degree and set off to accept an offer at the coveted University for Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, he began to pursue a more traditional form of painting full-time. Coming from a design and communication training, Urbanski puts these skills in direct dialogue with the art historical weight of painting and sculpture.

He has always loved the great master painters. The art historical inspirations of Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Franz Akerman, Trevor Coleman and Bridget Riley are reimagined through his work with a contemporary relevance: he recognises the current field of aesthetic experience as one facing an absence of reality where the ‘real’ retreats ever further behind the interactive screen of new media. His response to this is a rebellious appropriation of the materiality of the spraycan as paint on canvas. He employs an empathetic abstraction of Modernist architecture and appropriates the formal planes of mass culture and architecture in a carefully crafted pastiche of art historical movements with clear references to the Minimalist concerns of Sol LeWitt in machine-like aesthetic finishes.

The works you see before you are a testament to the German philosopher and art historian, Wilhelm Worringer’s assertion that abstract art is not a withdrawal from the world but a direct engagement with it. There is a ‘truth to production’ in the numerical titling of his paintings based upon production processes. Breaking with the traditional confines of the frame (square or rectangular), his latest works fracture the security of the picture plane where compositional forms misshape the canvas edge. Such an idea makes particular reference to Cubism and Brutalist Architecture.

His process connects both to a family history of artisanal skill and a desire to question the aesthetic of the machine. Just because something looks digital, doesn’t mean it was made by a machine. It is the tiny imperfections, the strange stray of the spraycan or the scar of the taped line that remind us of Urbanski’s hand-made and hands-on involvement in the work’s production. His meticulous attention to form, materials and precision belie a rare artistic skill born from a personal desire to be “better then the machine.”

ARTWORKS:

Andrzej Urbanski is a Polish-German painter & sculptor who resides in South Africa. His most recent solo exhibition was titled Mindgame, presented by Salon91 during March 2015. The Artist has been represented by the gallery at the Cape Town Art Fair (2013; 2014; 2015; 2016) and at the Turbine Art Fair (2014; 2015; 2016). During May this year he exhibited alongside American artist Tahiti Person at Salon91 in an exhibition titled, Paths (May 2016).

Visit Salon91 at Booth #17 at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg. For more information and enquiries please contact Salon91 on 021-424-6930.

Hanno van Zyl’s lifelong interest in illustration, comic art and graphic design drew him to study Visual Communication Design at the University of Stellenbosch. There he began to explore various roles as a commercial graphic designer, illustrator and artist. After graduating Hanno established himself as an independent creative operating from his collaborative space in Woodstock called “Only Today”. Informed by his experience as a commercial designer and illustrator he developed his practice as a fine artist.

His work explores the underbelly of everyday South-African life, by examining scenes and details often forgotten by dominant cultural narratives and popular discourse. His starkly rendered line drawings aestheticise the banal, thereby highlighting themes of social stratification, fear, economic disparity and violence.

ARTWORKS:

INSTALLATION VIEWS:

LIMITED EDITION:

Limited edition Zine by Hanno van Zyl and Salon Ninety One featuring an essay on PAY DIRT by Natasha Norman, images of works from the show, as well as a signed and numbered artwork. Available to buy from Salon91.

Le Riche’s latest body of work entitled ‘Colour Complex’ is an exploration of the artist’s obsession with colour and how the perception thereof can be manipulated through different materials and applications. The works are formalist in nature and invite the viewer to reconsider how they perceive colour by deconstructing it to the point where it becomes pixelated, monotonous and almost optically challenging to engage with. In practice, Le Riche deems colour his best friend and greatest enemy in the sense that it is exciting to explore, but impossible to control. It is for this reason that he chooses to stitch his explorations down in embroidery, tapestry, quilting and three-dimensional installations.

The Turbine Art Fair has become an important event on the SA Arts Calendar, presenting rare and crucial opportunities to collectors and artists alike. This Fair remains true to its intention to promote emerging talent as well as to nurture a new collectors base, resonating with the core philosophy of Salon Ninety One. Since its inception in 2008, Salon Ninety One has served as a platform for both emerging and established South African artists of all disciplines to gain exposure through sharing their creativity and vision. This year Salon Ninety One will be exhibiting at the Turbine Art Fair, booth GH14, for the third consecutive year to bring accessible, affordable contemporary art from Cape Town to both seasoned collectors and first-time buyers.

The artists exhibiting with Salon Ninety One have all excelled in their respective fields, with their names quickly gaining recognition across South Africa and abroad. Artists who embody the gallery’s signature style and the astounding growth and promise of local talent. The gallery will be representing the following artists at the fair: Andrew Sutherland, Andrzej Urbanski, Cathy Layzell, Heidi Fourie, Kirsten Beets, Kirsten Sims, Linsey Levendall, Paul Senyol, Tahiti Pehrson and Unathi Mkonto. Visitors to the Salon Ninety One booth can expect to see a diverse, and visually rich collection of illustration and painting ranging from abstract landscapes and geometric shapes to detailed portraiture, as well as selected sculptural works.

Salon Ninety One aims to delight audiences by subtly introducing the outdoors to the gallery space, with a carefully curated group of artists, each making a refreshing contribution to their discipline. Traces of street art are evident in Senyol’s colourful canvases and Levendall’s portraits, while Mkonto’s mechanical shapes, Pehrson’s geometric hand-cut paper works and Urbanski’s digital formalism recall elements of architecture. The abstract landscapes of Sutherland, Layzell and Fourie, alongside the natural environments depicted by Beets’ enchanting greenhouses and beach scenes and Sims’ whimsical garden parties further transport the viewer.

The Turbine Art Fair will be on view at the Turbine Hall in Newtown, Johannesburg between 14-17 July 2016.

A solo photographic exhibition by Naima Sebe presented by SALON NINETY ONE in association with Field Office.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Born to a Venda father and a German mother, my name is Naima Maleika Sebe. I entered life in the heart of Berlin, yet learnt about it in Woodstock, studied at the University of Cape Town and in NYC at Barnard College of Columbia University. A few years ago I discovered my father’s forgotten Olympus OM camera in the attic and immediately fell in love with this slow form of photography. Since then my analog camera has accompanied me on many trips around the world. I have found myself being more engaged in the present moment as I catch sight of all beautiful images around me and have gained more confidence about which of these frames in life I would like to immortalise.

“The Secret Lies Within” is based on my explorations through Turkey in 2015 which lead to many unexpected discoveries. A special thanks to Fadime Erdem for accompanying me on my trip through Turkey and showing me many places I would not have been able to see without her.

This exhibition features the latest paintings by Andrzej Urbanski alongside incredible hand-cut paper-works, created by Tahiti Pehrson on a recent visit to South Africa. The artists have also merged their talents on a collaborative piece. Urbanski works predominantly in spray paint, oils & acrylics on a variety of surfaces such as canvas, paper and acrylic-coated surfaces. His style is clean and abstract, yet dynamic, bold and colourful. Pehrson’s compositions seem to float – suspended, complex geometric and organic lattices created entirely by hand with paper as the only medium, and the subtle shadows the only colour.

Andrzej Urbanski is a Polish-German painter and sculptor who resides in Cape Town, South Africa. His most recent solo exhibition was titled Mindgame, presented by Salon91 during March 2015, and has since shown with the gallery at the Cape Town and Turbine Art Fairs and will be representing Salon91 at the upcoming FNB Joburg Art Fair this September.

ABOUT:
Paper Is You III is an exclusively paper-based exhibition, which focuses on the diversity and richness of paper as artistic medium. This is the third instalment in a range of exhibitions by the same name which have been hosted by Salon91 since 2011, titled after a poem written by artists Wessel Snyman and Katrine Claassens (who have both exhibited at the gallery). All too often art is is only considered ‘Art’ when it is an oil on canvas piece. Paper Is You challenges this preconception and celebrates the magic of paper-based artwork in all its forms and applications, as well as the incredible ways in which this carefully selected group of artists engage with this age-old medium, working both within and against the confines of the medium. There will be individual works by all of the participating artists on view, as well as collaborative artworks.

A solo exhibition of photography by Mareli Esterhuizen at Field Office, The Neighbourhood Edition, Woodstock in association with Salon Ninety One.

Artist statement:
‘Waiting for’ is a personal journey embracing the themes of trust, expectancy and timing. Waiting is an active process that relies on perfect timing, as well as having faith and a sense of expectancy in those seasons that may seem dead or best forgotten. Cultivating hope and perseverance in uncertain circumstances, without striving – is what makes one come alive.

I work quite intuitively, always trying to be truthful and sensitive to the subject matter. I enjoy juxtaposing elements which are out of their context together; and the tension that this creates. I also love the awkwardness that springs out of the imposed relationship between these objects. My style changes often and am a firm believer of spontaneity and following your intuition.

In the words of Li Hui: ‘Always experiment’.

Artist Profile:
Mareli was born in Cape Town and moved to the Eastern Cape at the age of 8. She studied photography at the NMMU and graduated with a B-Tech Degree in 2003. Her first solo show was held at Dirt Contemporary in Cape Town in 2004 as part of a residency programme. Since then she has been part of numerous group-exhibitions in Cape Town and abroad, including Sasol New Signatures and a digital display at the Louvre, Paris. The artist is currently living and working in Cape Town, working as Visual Manager at Chapel, running a part-time photographic school called School of Light while working on her personal body of work.

’You Are Here’ is a visual quest for space and a desire to go on imaginary adventures to find the place between being lost and found. This body of work is both an exploration of narrative on a larger format and an investigation of how abstract mark making can be combined with figurative story telling. Telling stories on a larger scale feels overwhelming and exciting and that feeling is what I want to investigate with this exhibition. Using old magazines, personal photographs and the infinite rabbit holes of the Internet as my points of departure I explore the landscapes and stories from the area ‘where the pin drops’. As always my focus is on people, places, parties, palms and pets…

The word ‘wilderness’ is linked historically to a continually evolving relationship between man and the environment. Up until the eighteenth century, the term ‘wilderness’ was associated with spaces of despair or fear. Since the nineteenth century it has been reimagined through the cultural idea of the sublime as a rare place where one can glimpse the face of God. What we seek in this concept of wilderness is a place without the anchors of our civilizing culture. A place without the artificial social supports of familiar ego structures.

What do we escape from when we go to nature? Perhaps we escape the biblical wilderness of our own urban lives.

This ironic twist forms the foundation of Layzell’s exhibition where the artist dissolves her image space into pure, formal, abstraction. The works move ironically from the more comforting natural and represenational to the disorientating neons in works that challenge traditional ideas of pictorial landscape.

Layzell’s wilderness is a place of paint and perception, a bold exploration of the limits of the illusionistic image.

My role is that of social anthropologist in an imaginary village/town where strange creatures live – there will be 5 central characters, probably a fox puppet, an owl man, a dog,,,,,,, and hopefully the rest will flow from there.(really just a way of continuing to make the kind of work that i like making and a way to incorporate all the things that interest me – houses, strange creatures, birds, dogs, specific trees, flora, etc.)

I really enjoyed making that ply installation for the window, so was thinking of making some smaller things – like the little puffin that was flying over the scene and just attached to the wall – kind of a spin on those kitch 70’s flying ceramic ducks.

As we reach the end of another year we would like to thank you for your loyal support, patronage & enthusiasm.

According to our annual tradition, 2015 concludes with a salon-style exhibition featuring accessible, affordable artwork across a broad range of mediums by some of Salon Ninety One’s favourite emerging and established local creatives. The exhibition is scheduled to run until the last week of January 2016. Artworks will be rotated regularly & after the opening day, works may be taken home on the day of purchase, so come treat yourself & your loved ones!

This year we will be supporting The Bookery (www.thebookery.org.za). The gallery & artists will be donating 10% of all sales towards building a library & running a creative workshop with the kids at Usasazo Secondary School in Khayelitsha. Everyone is invited to donate books – specifically Xhosa & Afrikaans language, as well as Art-related books.

Please join us on Saturday the 5th of December from 11am until 3pm for our final exhibition of 2015. It is going to be a festive day of STELLAR art, sweet treats by the lovely artist/baker Alice Toich, beer by Leopold7 and so much more…

We look forward to celebrating a truly fantastic year with our artists, friends, and clients.